Complexity Management. Optimizing Product Architecture of Industrial Products

The discussion about increased product complexity in Western European companieshas been omnipresent for decades. This is due to ever new demands (real or con-ceived) from the market and new possibilities (technical and others) open to the pro-viders of products and services to come up fast with very specific solutions. The man-agement of this complexity inside the company so as to achieve a balance between themarket benefits of more customer specific solutions and the internal costs induced bythis is still a big challenge. After years of research in this area there is still a lack oftools to help practitioners to take decisions about the right degree of complexity for aproduct or the right design of a product architecture.Mr. Marti brings together three perspectives on this topic in an easily understand-able and communicable way: The strategy of the company (combined with the matur-ity of the product), the functionality, and the physical complexity on a componentlevel. The visualization in a complexity matrix is an important new tool especially forfostering the understanding for complexity issues in a company!With this book Mr. Marti has come up with an outstanding contribution to productcomplexity management, which is crucial for the future competitiveness of companiesin Western Europe. I hope that this book will find a broad distribution as well in prac-tice as in theory for the sake of our countries!Prof. Dr. Thomas Friedli